Saturday, November 8, 2014

Learning from the Storm

On
March 21st, 1952, a cluster of tornadoes struck the
Mississippi valley. The damage stretched across nine states; 231
people died and 1,829 were injured. In White County, Arkansas, a
pair of cyclones leveled the town of Judsonia, destroyed 650
buildings, and killed 46 people.[Qu5]

Thirteen
days later, as the townsfolk were still picking through the wreckage,
twenty-six scientists arrived in Judsonia from Chicago. Instead of
first aid kits and blankets, they carried tape recorders and
notebooks. They fanned out across White County, picked a
representative cross-section of homes, and asked their inhabitants if
they could interview them.

To
their own surprise, most of the people they asked said yes.

Over
the next two weeks, working twelve hour days, they interviewed 423
people in Judsonia and the surrounding towns. When did they realize
the tornado was approaching? Did they heed warning signs? How did
they react when they realized what was happening? Did they panic,
did they weep, did they pray, how did they act after the storm
passed, did they have nightmares, headaches, trouble concentrating –
an average of an hour and a half with each man or woman. Then, back
in Chicago, they coded the results on to punch cards and fed them
into a computer.[Qu5][NORC]

These
scientists – mostly graduate students in sociology – worked for
the National Opinion Research Center, or NORC. From 1950 to 1954
NORC researched the behavior of people in disasters under a contract
from the Army Chemical Command (ACC). The Army knew that, in the
next world war, the United States would not be spared attack. Army
planners worried about panicked, screaming hordes clogging evacuation
routes, frenzied looters smashing shop windows, the breakdown of
social order in the chaos of nuclear war.

Storm,
earthquake, fire, and flood were the closest analogues to nuclear war
available in the United States. If the military were to effectively
protect the public in World War III, they needed to know how the
public would behave. Therefore, they paid NORC $50,000 to go into
disaster zones and find out.[Qu][Qu5]

The project was born from the 1948 Donora, Pennsylvania temperature
inversion. In a temperature inversion, hot air forms a layer above
cold air, trapping the cold air near the surface. Pollution from
nearby metalworks was trapped along with the cold air over Donora,
forming a thick, choking, poisonous smog that turned noon dark as
night. Twenty people died and 7,000 were sickened before rain
brought clean air back into the town.

The
Army Chemical Command, being in the poison gas business, was
naturally interested in the event. And they noticed something
unusual: many people in the area who had not actually been exposed to
the smog showed symptoms of it, apparently a sort of psychosomatic
poisoning.

The
ACC asked NORC to study Donora to measure and analyze the effect.
However, the NORC leadership felt that, by the time a research team
could be gathered and trained, too much time would have passed to
collect good data. Instead, they proposed setting up a field team
to rapidly respond to new disasters, who would go into the damaged
areas to interview the victims. The ACC agreed to the proposal:
“empirical study of peacetime disasters will yield knowledge
applicable to the understanding and control, not only of peacetime
disasters, but also of those which may be anticipated in the event of
another war.” This was not the first sociological study of a
disaster, but previous efforts had been isolated and singular, a
thesis here, a monograph there. The NORC effort would be a
sustained, on-going research program,
examining numerous events and looking for common features across a
wide range of events.[Qu][Kn][NORC]

Charles
Fritz, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, was one of
the leaders of the NORC research effort. Fritz had trained as a
photographer and worked on the Strategic Bombing Survey after World
War II. The survey attempted to quantify the physical, economic,
and social impact of the massive Allied air campaign against Germany
and Japan, including how the raids effected civilian morale. They
discovered that morale tended paradoxically to increase
under heavy bombing. But, politically, the survey was
supposed to justify the doctrine of
strategic bombing, and therefore the establishment of an independent
Air Force – and Fritz noticed that the military officers writing
the survey's conclusions omitted the sociologists' results, asserting
that strategic bombing could win wars by breaking civilian morale.
While the military may not have been interested, Fritz was, and after
leaving the survey he entered the University of Chicago's Ph.D.
program in sociology. While at Chicago he joined the NORC project,
leading the newborn field team.

Fritz
and his team began with practice interviews around Chicago, covering
porch collapses and other small incidents. Fritz later recalled
that “a lot of people we talked to
thought this was ridiculous... there was a feeling that particularly
disaster-struck populations, one they would be so preoccupied with
their problems or they would be so antagonistic to the idea of your
coming in to exploit them, get information from them when actually
you ought to be helping them in some way. But here you are a
scientist coming in to get information rather than to provide any
kind of assistance.” But, in fact, almost everyone they spoke to
agreed to be interviewed.[Kn][Qu6]

By
1951, the NORC field team was ready. On September 15th,
a plane crashed into a crowd of spectators during an airshow at
Flagler, Colorado, killing 20 people. The NORC field team was there
three days later, interviewing the survivors.[NORC]

Figure 1: Unidentified DRC Field Researcher in Hobart, Tasmania in 1967, Following a Forest Fire[DRC2]

(Used with Permission)

From
July 1951 through August 1952, the NORC team criss-crossed the
country, landing everywhere something horrible had happened. They
studied an earthquake in California, airplane crashes in Colorado and
New Jersey, gas explosions in New York, a factory explosion in
Minnesota, a coal mine disaster in Illinois, a carbon monoxide
poisoning in Chicago, and more. Altogether, they interviewed almost
a thousand people. The White County tornado study was the crowning
jewel of the program, producing a vast trove of data, to this day
still one of the most complete, thorough analyses of a single
disaster ever produced.[Qu][FM]

What
they learned surprised them.

It was
common knowledge that, in a disaster, people lose their heads, they
panic and flee mindlessly, often putting themselves in greater danger
than if they had stayed put. In fact, “in the face of danger,
most people do not lose self-control and run in panic, break down in
hysterics, or 'freeze' on the spot. Most individuals in a crisis
situation actively attempt to cope with it... Individuals may be
greatly afraid, their behavior may be very highly anxiety-motivated,
but they will act – alone and with others – to control the
situation they see themselves faced with.”[NORC]

It
was common knowledge that, in a disaster, looting inevitably breaks
out, that military force is necessary to prevent depredation and
chaos. In fact, while almost everyone had heard
of someone being looted, actual instances of looting were rare. In
the White County tornado study, there were many instances of
onlookers stealing small items as souvenirs, but only two cases of
actual looting for personal gain (a cash register and a grand
piano).[NORC]

It
was common knowledge that, in a disaster, only trained first
responders will act to rescue the trapped and the injured, while the
bulk of the populace waits apathetically for help. In fact, after
the tornadoes hit Judsonia, a quarter of the population – more than
half of the town's adult male survivors – began working to free
people trapped in rubble and care for the wounded hours before
outside help arrived.[FM][NORC]

Figure 2: Unidentified DRC Field Researcher in Jackson, Mississippi in 1966, Following a Tornado[DRC2]

(Used with Permission)

As
Quarantelli, one of the NORC researchers, put it, they quickly
“learned the basic principle that many of the central
beliefs about disasters held by planners, operational responders, and
even researchers were mostly mythological.”[Qu3] The
ACC contract was premised on faulty assumptions. In disasters,
keeping order is not the problem. The problem is coordination
– there were never shortages of willing volunteers for whatever
tasks needed doing, but people generally did not know what was
needed. Individuals had no sense of the larger situation, and
simply reacted to what they saw around them. Often they initially
didn't even realize that the disaster extended beyond their own house
or their own block. The only major problem of control was people
outside the disaster
zone rushing into the effected area to find relatives, help the
wounded, or simply sightsee, clogging roads and preventing emergency
vehicles from passing.[NORC]

NORC's
contract with the ACC ended in 1954. But by this point there was
already another organization working in the area. In 1952, the
Army, Navy, and Air Force Medical Services asked the National Academy
of Sciences (NAS) to fund a program of disaster research, to continue
NORC's work. Since funding was forthcoming, the NAS was willing,
and they established a Committee on Disaster Studies, later renamed
the Disaster Research Group. Charles Fritz and Harry Williams,
another sociologist, were picked to head the project – Fritz was
actually the first sociologist to work full-time for the NAS.[Qu9]
The committee published a series of titles on disaster research and
supported continued field studies of disasters, including the first
study outside the United States, on a flood in Holland in
1953.[Qu][FEMA]

Fritz
and Williams left the Disaster Research Group in 1959, and the Group
shut down in 1962. But the baton was quickly picked up at Ohio
State University, where Enrico Quarantelli had landed after
graduating from Chicago.

Quarantelli
temporarily left the disaster research field after finishing his
Master's degree, but stayed in touch with Fritz. In 1961, Russell
Dynes and Eugene Haas, two other OSU sociologists, approached him.
They were putting together a proposal to fund more field research,
had heard of his involvement with the NORC study, and wanted him to
join their project, which Quarantelli agreed to. Besides field
research, they also asked for money to conduct laboratory simulations
studies, which were very trendy in social science in the early '60s .
The three asked the National Science Foundation for $50,000 over
eighteen months for the project.

Figure 3: From Left to Right: Steven R. Tripp, Enrico L. Quarantelli, and Russell R. Dynes, at a Conference in 1968[DRC2]

(Used with Permission)

Somehow
– they never did learn how – their request got into the hands of
the Office of Civil Defense (OCD). Before they had even received
the rejection notice from the National Science Foundation, they got a
call from an official of the OCD, who invited them to come to
Washington to meet with a group from civil defense and the Air Force
Office of Scientific Research. Jim Kerr, one of the OCD officers,
suggested that they would be more interested in supporting an entire
center to study disasters rather than just a series of field studies.
He suggested $200,000 per year as a starting budget, with a
five-year initial contract. The Air Force was more interested in
the laboratory simulations studies, and indicated they would be
willing to chip in as well. The three sociologists quickly agreed,
and the Disaster Research Center (DRC) was inaugurated in the fall of
1963.[Kn][Qu][Qu4]

The
DRC would be the primary center of disaster research for the next
twenty years. Haas ran the simulations lab, while Quarantelli and
Dynes focused on field studies. The government, despite paying for
the Center, gave them considerable freedom to pursue their own
interests; according to Quarantelli, there “was very little effort
made to direct what should be studied and/or how it should be
studied.”[Qu]

Quarantelli,
Dynes, and Haas used this freedom to shift the focus of disaster
research away from individual reactions, the focus of earlier
research with its emphasis on panic and hysteria, towards how first
responders planned for and coped with disasters.[QDW]
DRC field researchers – like NORC, mostly sociology graduate
students – were required to keep a go bag ready at all times and to
head for the airport on a moment's notice.[Qu7] They
would fly to disasters still in progress and attach themselves as
observers to emergency command staffs – first responders sometimes
even asked them for advice.[Kn] Haas, back at the
university, had volunteers perform various tasks to measure how their
behavior changed under stress, culminating in a simulation of a plane
crash for a group of police dispatchers.[DRC] The
simulation work ended in the late '60s after the Air Force lost
interest and Haas left Ohio State, but the field studies continued,
expanding into studying civil unrest during the turbulent years of
the Vietnam War.

Unfortunately,
Quarantelli and his coworkers eventually realized that the reason
their sponsors allowed them so much freedom was because most of them
weren't paying attention. Quarantelli said they “learned
later... [OCD and Air Force] officials saw the proposal as
something... to show they were doing something to meet the new threat
to American society.”[Kn]
“Sponsored research, at least in the early days, was primarily
commissioned at the highest levels of the agencies for reasons other
than seeking answers to practical problems... Disaster research was
initiated (and the initiation came from the agencies and not social
scientists) because of internal bureaucratic pressure for agencies to
be current with the post World War II phenomena of social science
research being on the agenda of many government groups.”[Qu]

An
OCD-sponsored study of local civil defense offices was a prime
example. The DRC interviewed a number of officials at these
offices, and found that most of them were not particularly interested
in preparing for a nuclear war. They were spending their time
preparing for natural disasters and industrial accidents, with
perhaps some work on fallout shelters as a sideline. Quarantelli
and Dynes told their OCD sponsors that they needed to start working
on smaller-scale disasters as well if they wanted to gain the local
offices' cooperation in preparing for a nuclear conflict. But the
OCD wasn't interested – their policy was that they were exclusively
concerned with nuclear war, and that policy was not going to change
just because it wasn't working, at least not yet.[Qu6]

But,
while the OCD may not have been paying attention, others were.
Information from disaster research began to appear in textbooks to
train first responders. In the 1970s, sociologists outside the DRC
started to take an interest – a sometimes very critical interest –
in the new field. The DRC, now located at the University of
Delaware, remains a key center of the field, and is still funded by
the OCD's descendant, the Federal Emergency Management
Agency.[Qu8][FEMA]

[Qu]:
Quarantelli, E. L. “Disaster Studies: An Analysis of the Social
Historical Factors Affecting the Development of Research in the
Area.” International
Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters. http://www.ijmed.org/articles/145/

[Qu2]:
Quarantelli, E. L. “Study and Research in the United States.”
Proceedings
of Organizational and Community Responses to Disasters.
pp. 17-26.

[Qu3]:
Quarantelli, E. L. “Commentary on The Worth of the NAS-NRC
(1952-63) and DRC (1963-present) Studies of Individual and Social
Response to Disasters.” Social
Science and Natural Hazards.
Abt Books, 1981. pp. 122-135.

[Qu6]: Interview with E. L. Quarantelli. The First 72 Hours: A
Community Approach to Disaster Preparedness. iUniverse, 2004. pp.
321-339.

[Qu7]: Quarantelli, E. L. “The Disaster Research Center (DRC)
Field Studies of Organized Behavior in the Crisis Time Period of
Disasters.” Methods of Disaster Research. pp.
94-117. http://www.ijmed.org/articles/406/

[Qu9]: Quarantelli, E. L. “Disaster Studies: The Consequences of
the Historical Use of a Sociological Approach in the Development of
Research.” International Journal of Mass Emergencies and
Disasters, Vol. 12 No. 1 (March 1994), pp. 25-49.